"Five days."
Opportunities for improvement. He thought of his district manager and the two signatures that slowed the line.
On page two, under Evidence Considered, item seven: Civilian witness statement and recording (L. Haddad). Her name, cut down to an initial.
"That's what made it hold," Marcus said. "Without her, his camera has no sound for the beginning. Just me with my hands up and him walking in. His word."
"Against yours."
"Against a silence," Marcus said.
IX
The chief's letter offered a meeting. Marcus wrote back that he would come if Officer Rusk would be in the room, knowing the officer couldn't be required to.
"He wasn't ordered," Yost told him on the phone. "I want you to know that. He said yes before I finished asking."
So in the second week of November, eleven weeks after pump four, Marcus drove back to Merritt in his own gray Buick, his own registration in the glove box, which he checked twice before leaving the driveway and once at a rest stop in Effingham, and disliked himself a little each time.
He stopped at the Sunrise without having planned to, and pumped gas at pump four, because he was who he was, with his back to the ice machine. No cruiser sat there.
Leila came around the counter and then didn't seem to know what to do once she was around it.
"My uncle's charging them for coffee now," she said, by way of news. "He put up a sign, ALL BEVERAGES MUST BE PURCHASED. Officer Petrakis paid a dollar sixty-nine and looked like he'd been slapped." She shrugged. "My uncle's still mad at me. Less. He told my mom on the phone I was brave. He doesn't know I heard."
"You were."
"I was scared the whole time."